Ford Proposes $4 Billion Handout to Corporations

Ontario Conservative Leader Doug Ford announced a plan to give corporations a big tax break, dropping their tax rate from 11.5% to 10.5%.

Ford has argued this is necessary to encourage businesses to set up shop in Ontario. But corporate profits in Ontario have never been larger.

In the first quarter of last year, corporations raked in $133 billion of profit in Ontario. This was up 15% from Q1 of the previous year and represented a record-high 16.1% of Ontario’s GDP.

It is certainly not the case that corporations are in need of an additional incentive to do business in Ontario — they are already doing better than ever before.

Most workers, however, are not doing any better than they were 40 years ago as wages have flatlined and working conditions have deteriorated.

Ford’s corporate tax giveaway will make it harder to support those who are struggling, by reducing public revenues by more than $4 billion over the next three years (see calculations at the end of the text).

For comparison, the universal child care programs proposed by the NDP and Liberals cost $3 billion and $2.2 billion respectively.

With corporations and the rich doing better than ever before — and most people struggling without a pay raise in decades — Doug Ford is proposing a redistribution of $4 billion from public services to corporations and their owners.

He may have emblazoned “For The People” on the side of his campaign bus, but Doug Ford’s corporate tax break doesn’t benefit us — it’s for millionaires like himself.

Calculations: The 2018 Ontario budget includes $46.7 billion in revenue from corporations over the next 3 years. This assumes total corporate profits of $406.09 billion over the same time period and a tax rate of 11.5%. At a tax rate of 10.5%, as proposed by Ford, tax revenue drops to $42.64 billion over 3 years — a difference of $4.06 billion over 3 years, or an average of $1.35 billion per year.